RussianSpaceWeb has reported that the possible landing sites for Chandrayaan-II called Luna-Resurs by the Russians have been selected. The selection is not final and seems to have been made (or covers only the Russian angle of the story) by Russian space organizations.

Much more info on site selection here. Chandrayaan 2 is called Luna-Resurs (Moon Resource) in Russia, and it's one of a pair of missions, the other called Luna-Glob. Luna-Resurs was supposed to fly in 2013 but may be delayed into 2014 by Indian issues, mainly with the launch vehicle, I believe. Luna-Glob will launch a year later. LR goes to the south, LG to the north. Now that they have found hydrogen in illuminated areas as well as permanent shadows the whole question of studying it is much easier, so the sites are no longer very close to the poles.

This link goes to an intro page from which you can link to numerous presentations, most of them in English. Thanks to our Russian colleagues for making them available.

I am resurrecting this ancient thread because, after a long wait, Chandrayaan 2 will soon be launched to the Moon.

The links above give some information on very early thoughts about this mission, which was to be a joint India-Russia flight. The Russians called the mission Luna-Resurs (resources), and they would provide a lander and in some versions of it, a rover as well. India provided an orbiter and a mini-rover as well as a launch. Later the Russians pulled out and India took over all aspects of the mission.

The site selection work described above went through multiple phases in Russia. When India took over they did some of their own work on site selection. See this report from LPSC in 2015:

Some work has been done since by two groups that I am aware of, but I am waiting for a paper release before I can say more. Don't pay too much attention to press reports which are almost always out of date.

The rover mission is only intended to survive one lunar day, and its activities will be recorded here.

This article says that the site will be on a "plain between two craters, Manzinus C and Simpelius N, at a latitude of about 70° south", in other words here:

The coordinates are approximately 70.8 south, 22.9 east.

The article has a horrible representation of the zone of previous landings with red dots apparently purporting to be old landing sites, but they are just random. Really, how hard would it have been to do that right? However, we may have a site at last. I hope there will be something about it at LPSC - whose abstracts will be released on Friday!

Launch will now be no earlier than 3 January 2019, and the lander has been named Vikram after V. A. Sarabhai, regarded as the initiator of the Indian space program. No word I am aware of concerning a name for the rover.

description of changes to Chandrayaan 2, which leaves me concerned that more testing might be needed and could lead to further delays. I hope everything will be OK. I would not want to see a premature launch just to meet a schedule.

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